


the gods are dead (and so am i)

by sanquiine (orphan_account)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: ALL THE ANGST, Angst, Dark, Depressed Steve Rogers, Fight Clubs, Gen, M/M, Slice of Life, Steve is sad, sad Steve Rogers, theres no happy ending but theres no sad ending either so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 06:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20990621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/sanquiine
Summary: The Avengers file lays across from him. His fingernails tap against His Table. His coffee cup is now cold but he keeps his hand wrapped around it for the sake of doing something. The Avengers file lays across from him.He almost pours it a drink(in which steve is sad).





	the gods are dead (and so am i)

**Author's Note:**

> hi. this is a kind of fic in which i have written down some ideas and snippets of a longer fic i want to work, but i just wanted to post it because i really want to hear what you think (and i need validation). i hope you like it.

Look to the sky– watch the gold bleed onto a crumbling canvas and scratch like chalk over the horizon. His hair is damp against the grass, cheekbones stained in washed out yellow and lips leaking pale orange. The sun is peeking over the outline of blurry buildings, the sunrise melancholic and celestial whilst painting this beaten down world in soft colour. 

His fingers curl into the grass, as his hair fans around his head like a golden halo around glowing skin and big eyes. Noise filters through the air, gentle and soft and he thinks  _ far too _ for this crumbling world, but still he sighs through the fuzziness in his chest as gold sparkles on his nose like glitter. 

0658, the day is still so young and really, he is too though he feels anything but. The last remnants of stars are slipping away into the sunrise (shards of light, splintered rays), and the city's tragic hostility from last night is falling to the ground. 

He falls with it. (Don't look back).

  
  


Irises shimmering, he pushes himself onto his elbows, though his arms are aching and weak and he only catches a glimpse of the outlined city before he his head falls back onto the grass. Look to the sky– the sunrise is waiting. His hands have lost all feeling.  <strike> This isn't supposed to happen. This isn't supposed to happen. </strike>

It's not so cold, now, he thinks, but the air is dense and suffocating and he is drowning in what he can't see, as though it has hands over his throat and chest. It's familiar and it hurts to breathe ( <strike> he can't do this again </strike> ), and maybe it's just him finally losing his mind after all these strange fucked up years. At this point, he's not sure what can surprise him.

Offhandedly, he knows that if anybody stumbles upon him now, he will look like just another messed up millennial submerged in rebellion, hungover on the grass of a washed up park in a washed up city. He wonders what the media would say, if they ever saw what he did in his free time. 

Look to the sky and watch it turn into soft blue, vast pastel, dotted by clouds with the golden sun melting the frost on the ground. The trees that ring the little clearing are leafless and sad, branches brittle like his bones– his cracking heart, casting shadows that are long and cold. 

Dense and fuzzy, the air is suffocating and he can't  _ breathe _ , (but has he ever really at all)? The clearing is crumbling, celestial sky fragmented by black. The earth is rotating on an axis and oh god it's  _ 2012. _

There is the blood of the past running through his veins and the tragedy of centuries in his heart– and now? And now he can't  _ breathe  _ because the air is too thick, too oppressive. His skin is perfect like porcelain. He is twenty-four and the sky is melting away.

Noises are quiet, though the city is coming alive. His legs have lost all feelings and there is a burn in the thigh of his sweats. Children are walking to school. 0747– he's twenty-four years old. Don't look back. His mother's name was Sarah. Bucky died when he was twenty-five.

Voices closer, closer,  _ closer. _ The sea levels are rising. His heart beats 100,000 times a day. The air is hot. It's January. 

Don't look back.

(The sky is falling).

  
  


-

  
  


There is war brewing beneath his feet.

(Don't stop).

He pushes his legs faster faster  _ faster _ until his surroundings are nothing more than a blur of greenbluegrey, the early morning quiet ringing in his ears. His feet thud against the concrete, lungs screaming for air and lips chapped from the January chill. 

By now, the sun has risen past the horizon and hangs lazily in the canvas of blue, dotted by strokes of soft clouds. Burning rubber sits heavily in the air, heavy in his senses, and everything is so  _ bright _ , so loud, so strong– his ears are ringing and there is blood in his mouth. His teeth are metal in his gums. 

(Don't Stop).

  
  


“ _ Watch it!” _

He manages to stutter out an apology before he swerves into an alleyway, presses his head into the brick wall and heaves until he can breathe again. He digs his fingertips into the bricks until they crack. There is dried blood on the ground.

He vomits until there is nothing left in his stomach, fingers denting the brick and the January chill loosening around his chest. Breathe shallow, look to the sky, watch the buildings disappear into the blue. Vomits his heart onto the dirty ground. 

(What is it you are living for)?

  
  


-x-

-x-

  
  


He returns to His Apartment (His Apartment because it isn't  _ his  _ apartment just-) at 0902. Strips out of his sweaty clothes and steps into the shower, turning it as hot as it can go, relishing as the burn prickles over his skin. Fog mists on the glass, and he half wonders what Bucky would make of this strange world of hot showers and His Apartment. 

  
  


After half and hour, his alarm on the phone Shield gave him blares (“I am ninety not stupid”, he snaps at the faceless shield lady only trying to help. He screams his self-hatred into pillow that night). He dries and dresses faster than the mirror can defog, only catching a glimpse of his skin, mottled and pink, in the window.

If his too-soft clothes burn a little against his raw skin, he doesn't feel it. 

-

The  _ Avengers  _ file lays across from him. His fingernails tap against His Table. His coffee cup is now cold but he keeps his hand wrapped around it for the sake of doing something. The  _ Avengers  _ file lays across from him. 

He almost pours it a drink. 

-

  
  


He gets a motorcycle and a leather jacket and doesn't wear a helmet, riding through the back roads with a chill lacing up his spine. He leans further forwards, leans further sideways on the corners, reaches up his arms and tries to catch happiness before it slips through his fingers. In the distance, city lights slant through the night, blur in the way they did when he was small and sick and holding every moment as if his last. 

  
  


( _ “You're not going to die, Stevie!” _ )

  
  


He stops on the top of a hill. Overhead, the stars are bright and twinkling and his mother is calling from her grave. His hands are steady and his heart is slow, beating in the cage of his ribs whilst melancholy echoes through the emptiness of his bones. There are no aches in his muscles 

<strike> He can't feel anything at all. </strike>

  
  


-x-

  
  


He's twenty-four and all his friends are dead.

  
  


-x-

  
  


He almost pours it a drink.

  
  


-x-

  
  


<strike> Howard </strike> Stark sits across from him on a sunny morning in April. The bright white sunlight streams through his blinds and spills onto the table, and Stark clasps his hands around a mug of coffee.

The resemblance is striking and stunting.  <strike> Howard sits across from him </strike> . Stark's goatee is perfect; he wears a dark blue suit, white shirt and grey tie, and Steve guesses no doubt he has a meeting after this. Best not keep them waiting.

“Well, Cap,” Stark starts, and it startles Steve out of his self-indulgent stupor of the past. “The offer still stands, call Pepper if you need anything.”

He stands, and Steve follows him to the door where he waves goodbye with a small smile he hope isn't as stiff as it feels and a quiet “Goodbye, Stark,” before the door shuts and Stark disappears to wherever he goes and-

Steve presses his back against the door and slides down until knees knock against his chest. 

Howard Stark echoes through his thoughts. 

  
  
  


-x-

-x-

  
  
  


He moves into the tower two week later in May. His ribs are too heavy as he stares up at the ceiling that seems to never end, cream and immaculate with bright artificial lights that hurt his eyes. His sheets are blue and his pillows red. The duvet is white. 

This is America.

_ This  _ is America, and it is full of bright lights and electricity coursing through the air. Everything is wired, everything is buzzing, everything is someone else's and nothing is new except what a factory manages to sell.

This is America.

What does that make him?

-

He learns that Stark doesn't sleep much.  <strike>Neither did Howard</strike>. He learns that Stark likes his coffee black and he drinks it more than he eats.  <strike> Howard did too </strike> . He learns that Stark is very clever and a genius in a world too far behind.  <strike>Howard</strike>–

He learns to not mention Howard to Stark. Ignores the knife that bloodies his heart. 

This is not America. 

What does that make him?

-

  
  


On a Thursday, he meets Natasha in the hallway to his room. It is dark, and he finds her sat cross legged on the floor as the light from the moon paints her hair in silver. Her eyes are closed but he knows she knows he is there, though his footsteps are silent and soft and he can't seem to make the words pass his bitten tongue. 

Stretching (like a cat, a dark cat with sly eyes and bad intentions), she opens one eye at him lazily and cocks her head to one side. “It's late,” she remarks, the soft syllables of her voice shaking him out of his silence. 

“Early.”

She shrugs and cracks her neck and the action is so  _ human _ he forgets he is the inhuman one here, a dirty wolf hidden by muscle and American dreams. 

“Why aren't you sleeping?” She asks, and he wants to raise his hackles and ask her why  _ she  _ isn't (because she is the  _ human  _ here, she is the-), but he knows Natasha well enough to know she doesn't share what you don't need to know and this is one of Those Times where Natasha knows best. 

Instead, he says, “I've slept for seventy years, ma'am, I think I've had my fill,” and the déjà vu creeps up his spine like the itching legs of a spider. He links his fingers together behind his back.

(He is not human).

He stands in silence for a second, and then steps by her to his door, the metal door handle sending spikes of cold up his arm he tries to ignore. (He is not human). 

“Would you like anything?” He asks, because he feels rude letting her stay out here and his mother raised him better than to let a  <strike>human</strike> lady stay out in the cold. She shrugs and closes her eyes again. 

“Nothing you can give me.”

And there is that.

(He is not human). 

  
  
  
  


He sits against his door and wonders if Natasha is still on the other side. (He pretends not to hear her breathing). He sits against his door and stares through the big window opposite, the stars splashed across the inky sky shattering behind his eyelids when he closes them. (He pretends not to hear her breathing). There is adrenaline still coursing through his blood and anticipation in his hollow bones. (He hopes she didn’t notice the blood on his knuckles).

There is a stranger in a bar on the outskirts of this electric city nursing fingers shattered by the anger of a century.

(Steve pretends not to hear him breathing).

  
  


-

  
  


Look to the sky; watch it bleed red with the melancholy in his heart. He is 24 and all his friends are dead. 

What does that make him?

Look to the sky and cradle his sadness in his palms, tear it from his chest and place it by his feet. There is a war brewing beneath his feet.

(He almost pours it a drink).

**Author's Note:**

> please tell me what you think :)


End file.
